Hi all, Yesterday was the first GNOME 3 user day [1, 2]. Many thanks to everyone who contributed.
I was really pleased with how the event went. Attendance was excellent, and those who participated seemed to get a lot out of it. It certainly seemed to boost enthusiasm, and I daresay that we managed to calm a few critics (though there was surprisingly little of that, actually). I also thought that the publicity that was generated was useful, and the fact that we've held the session will come in handy in our ongoing PR work. We might want to hold more of these events in the future, so it seems worthwhile to examine how yesterday went. Some observations: * Attendance was good at all three sessions. The 15:00-16:00 session was vastly more popular than the others though. Almost too popular. * The popularity of the second session made it difficult (though not impossible) to manage the discussion. I ended up having to list the questions that were asked, which I then called out in sequence. This was a bit messy at times, but worked fairly well on the whole. (I eventually transferred the list of questions to an Etherpad, which other volunteers were then able to use.) - As a result of these experiences, the third and final session of the day was organised using two channels - one for asking questions and one for answering and discussing them. Though this was undoubtedly more efficient, I actually thought that it impaired the atmosphere of the event, since it left most of the participants disconnected from the discussion. - I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts on the best way to organise these sessions in the future. Andre mentioned that there is a bot that can be used for hosting meetings. That could be an interesting line to pursue. Another possibility might be to use an Etherpad to record the questions that are asked, in much the same way that we ended the second session of the day. * In future, we need to have details on how the sessions will be organised on the wiki prior to the event itself. This will ensure that latecomers are informed about how we are organising things. * The questions asked in the sessions covered a lot of ground. Most were design questions (generally relating to GNOME Shell), but technical issues were also raised. There wasn't enough expertise in the channel to answer the questions at times. Though I think it's fine to refer people on or even to say 'I don't know', we do want to be able to address most of the queries that are brought to us. - There are two ways we can approach this issue (that I can think of). First - we can be clear about the kind of knowledge and expertise that are being made available: we can say 'Andreas will be answering design questions' or 'Fred will be taking questions about the GNOME 3 platform'. The other approach is to broaden the amount of expertise that is on hand for each session. Having each one be co-hosted by a designer and a developer could work. Any thoughts about any of this? Anything that I've missed? (You can view the logs of the event on the wiki [2].) An aside: one thing that the user day made clear to me is how many enthusiastic GNOME users there are out there. This project has a lot of supporters - the more we can reach out to them, the better. Best wishes, Allan [1] http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/UserDays/ [2] http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/UserDays/2011-02-15 -- Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/ IRC: aday on irc.gnome.org -- marketing-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
